This is the first of, hopefully, many posts relating to my work. I'm sure many of you readers will find overarching meaningfulness in these posts in relation to your own work environments and lives in general.
One of the primary ways to ensure survival while working in a Power Plant is "listen to your nose". Your nose is an incredible gift, often endowed with phenomenal talent of "knowing" something is amiss before any other sense. Not only can one's nose deduce that there is a problem, it also the number one means of finding the problem. Which brings me to relating yesterday's pertinent events.
I often wander through the Plant (subject for a future post) and last night as I wandered I smelled acid. My brain said, "Well, of course there's acid.. there's a heat exchanger in the acid bath right now, that's a normal matter." My nose said, "No wait, that smell is too strong. There's trouble. Go look and see if I'm right." And so I went and looked, and there was the acid bath, and there was a broken plastic tube spraying as happily as any venetian fountain all across the cement surrounding the area. Aha!
Some other times when the nose alerted me of danger are 1) when there were too many carts plugged in to be charged and the cable couldn't handle the current draw and got quite hot... and smelled terrible. Finding the culprit was only possible through "directional sniffing". 2) numerous times when an expansion joint had burst hurling near boiling water through the engine room, the smell of glycol-rich water was the first notifier of the disaster.
Sometimes your nose can merely let you know what is going on during normal operation. I know another operator has started purging the air out of one of our absorption chillers if there is a chemically banana smell in the air (the smell of lithium bromide).
Listen to your nose.
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This assumes you have a good sniffer. We all (meaning the Seelye/Shackelford clan) seem to be blessed with especially good noses. I am always surprised when others do not smell things like 'electrical over-heating,''rice is scorching,' and so on.
I recently read an interview with a chef and wine taster. He smells and tastes *everything*, rocks, leaves, etc. in order to expand his palate, and give him words to describe the tastes he encounters in food.
I do find that I notice trouble with my nose. I don't actually think about it much, but when Peter was around and would smell everything, it made me realize that I do exactly the same thing. Our kids do it too, but it might just be because I do. Maybe I do it because Mom and Dad did?
After I'd written the post I finished my tasks around the plant and went to check on the pool pump room... was doing some normal photometer tests when I smelled the very sharp odor of muriatic acid. Oh my! The acid pump had been leaking and splashing acid all around the area (thankfully wasn't running at the time). Not the best surprise, for sure, but good I noticed it. We also have a large container filled with a Chlorine liquid solution. Right between the acid container and the chlorine container was a rather unpleasant smell. dc:
The flowers last night along the coast smelled really good as I waited for the officer to return my license, registration and proof of insurance. 80mph on a 65mph empty freeway. Sigh.
It's me that smells things more than Dad, and my Dad also smells things. Daniel wouldn't let me feed him anything on a spoon as a baby until it passed the sniff test.
Didn't you recently write an very good post about obeying things like traffic laws?
Ha! Amelia smells EVERYTHING, and also tries to taste everything. The roses in our yard smelled so good to her that she would go sit by them and eat handfuls of petals. She also identifies the owner of all hand-me-downs. At least she knows and can maybe be thankful to her cousins for the clothes!
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